The Burning World

by Isaac Marion

  Julie grabs my hand and pulls me to the back of the plane where her mother sits on the floor, clinging to her cable for an anchor while the plane rocks and bounces.

  “Hold on, Mom,” Julie says. “Please hold on.”

  She slips into the last remaining row of seats and takes a deep, slow breath, then looks at me with sudden calm. “Sit with me?”

  I sit with her. The oxygen masks dangle in front of us but we don’t bother. We look out the window at the rapidly approaching shore of what my basement memories call East Atlantic Beach. Beyond that, JFK International Airport, and everywhere around it . . .

  Madness. Monsters. A city full of death. Even if we survive this plunge, it’s hard to see a future.

  “Stop it,” Julie says, watching the side of my face as the runway approaches at a wild angle. “Be with me.”

  I look into her glistening eyes and the roaring around me goes quiet. Strange, how complications melt away in the face of disaster. How all the fear and shame and tangled knots of logic suddenly dissolve in the heat, leaving only a core of love that cares nothing for the noise in our heads, that dismisses our arguments and ignores our hesitations. A love that simply is.

  In this moment, however brief it might be, everything is clear. Julie kisses me and I kiss her back, ordering myself not to pull away, ever, because whatever might be ending today, this is how I want it to end.

  My eyes are closed, all senses focused on her, so there is no terrible buildup to the impact. I am kissing Julie, I am kissing Julie, I am—

  WE

  THERE ARE MANY EARTHS inside the earth. The outermost is the busiest, with its oceans and forests and cities, its buzzing, hissing, chirping, grunting, roaring, speaking, and singing. This is the surface, the present, the game board on which life plays. Beneath the surface is the hidden world of holes and tunnels, where creatures creep and slither and hold secret meetings in the strata of eons past. And at the center is the fire that forged it all, Earth’s raging, spinning heart, full of endless momentum, always ready to quake and erupt, forever growling change.

  The earth likes change. It grows bored with balance; rest makes it restless. The moment its inhabitants think they know the rules, it shakes the board clear and moves on to the next game.

  Next epoch. Next era. Next evolution.

  We swim up through the mantle and into the bedrock, through Paleocene and Pliocene and Holocene, through our own bones and shells from species to species, generation to generation, each piece of us recognizing its remains as we float past them, indulging in brief bursts of nostalgia.

  This is something we do. We remember and observe, and in the Higher levels where such things are possible, we hope.

  One thing we do not do is act. We are books, not authors. There are times—like this present age of soft lines and translucent barriers and power vacuums filling with poison—when we wish we could be more. But the world belongs to the living, and they have not yet asked for our help.

  So we float upward, through young rock and dark dirt and into the lowest depths of a once-great city. We pass through stagnant water tunnels and ancient brick sewage pipes clogged with century-spanning strata of shit, then up into the dense web of cables that were the neurons of New York’s brain before a thousand bullets silenced its thoughts.

  Now New York is mindless. Gray and rotting. An undead city walking without purpose, repeating echoes of its former life until they’re worn beyond recognition, and always, always seeking flesh.

  We breach the surface and the noise hits us, a human density rarely found in the new world. The queue forms somewhere in the muck of the Jersey City Bayou, condenses on the floating Holland Footbridge, and spills out into a cramped mess of fear and desperation against the Manhattan border gate.

  It’s here, within sight of the razor wire fence and its weary customs agents, that we find the boy and his new guardians. They stand in a small park in a crowd of battered refugees, carrying only overstuffed backpacks after hiding their van in a suburban garage. There is no room for vehicles in this coveted real estate. There is barely room for people. Every inch of Manhattan has been put to use, eighty-floor high-rises converted into tenements, parks into high-yield corn fields, the streets themselves into sprawling tent cities. Only the scythe of the modern mortality rate creates vacancies for the crowd outside. Concrete flood barriers form a wall around the island, and the swollen East River and Hudson surround it like invading armies, splashing over the top in every stiff breeze. Submerged to her chest, Lady Liberty is no longer a proud torchbearer standing tall for freedom. She is a drowning swimmer waving for help.

  “Electricity,” Gebre says. “Plumbing. Law enforcement. And zero undead hordes.”

  Gael sighs and picks his pack off the muddy grass as the line advances. “Yeah.”

  “They won’t put us on salvage crews. There has to be thousands of kids in there and they will need teachers.”

  “Hopefully for more diverse subjects than they did in UT-AZ. My doctorate doesn’t qualify me to teach rifle maintenance.”

  “Gael, Gael, Gael,” Gebre says, gesturing grandly to the crumbled high-rises beyond the fence. “It’s New York City.”

  The boy watches his guardians through a dark veil. On their insistence, he is once again hiding behind his Ray-Bans. He has not spoken since they deterred him from DC, but not because he’s angry. He could have left them if he chose to and finished his journey alone, but he stayed with them. He followed them here to this sinking island of denial, tilting his ear to some obscure suggestion. A voice from the deep halls of the Library, the rustling of countless pages forming a whisper.

  “What do you think, Rover?” Gebre asks. “You want to go to school? I can teach you wars and governments, Gael can teach you quarks and bosons. All kinds of useless things!”

  The boy is not listening. He is looking south down Canal Street, at a procession of white commuter vans. The boy sees the grim faces of the drivers, but the passengers are only silhouettes. He peers hard at the tinted windows, trying to penetrate the glass.

  “Ages and skills,” the customs agent says, approaching Gebre with a clipboard.

  “I’m forty-three,” Gebre replies. “Gael’s thirty-four, and Rover’s . . . ten.”

  “I taught quantum physics at Brown University,” Gael says.

  The agent looks up blankly. “We don’t have any need for—”

  “Applied quantum physics,” Gebre interjects, flashing a smile. “He can . . . design better bullets?”

  Gael stares coldly at the agent. The agent makes a mark on his board. “And you?” he grunts toward Gebre without looking up.

  “Gun maintenance,” Gebre says, still grinning.

  “My husband is being modest,” Gael says with a subdued ferocity. “He has a doctorate in world history.”

  Gebre sighs. “Fine, yes, I’m a historian. And I’m also very good at cleaning M16s.”

  The agent glances between him and Gael. He makes another mark on his board. “We’ll find you something. Always new openings in Salvage.”

  Gael and Gebre exchange a glance.

  “And what about the boy here, is he—”

  The agent drops his clipboard.

  The boy is staring hard at the vans as they wait in front of a service gate. His sunglasses are in his hand. His impossible eyes are wide, trying to drill through the vans’ tinted glass and see the people inside, because somewhere in today’s haul of agitators and underperformers, there is a signal, a beacon, like someone is trying to tell him something.

  And are we trying to tell him something? Are we speaking to him now? A book speaks whenever someone reads it, and only its reader knows what it has said.

  A hand clamps onto the boy’s shoulder.

  “I’ve got another uncategorized,” the agent says into his walkie. “Juvenile. Severe iris gilding. Sending him your way.”

  “Let go of him!” Gael shouts.

  “He’s infected,” the agent says. “He’l
l be taken to our facilities for care.”

  Three guards emerge from the customs booth and push Gael and Gebre aside.

  “Please don’t do this,” Gebre says. “He’s not Dead.”

  “Uncategorized are being studied for a new plague management program,” the agent says. “Your boy’s going to help make the world safe again.”

  The boy listens to his guardians’ voices. They rise steadily, from imploring to demanding to desperate as grim-faced men lead him beyond the fence. The last thing he hears sounds like a promise:

  “We’ll find you! We won’t leave you with them!”

  What is the ratio, he wonders? Three bad people are dragging him away from two good people; is there more bad than good? Is there any consensus on humanity?

  He catches one last glimpse of the vans. He sees the pitted surface of the window glass, gnarled silica bubbles and dust particles like mountains. But his vision crashes against the darkness inside. He sees a familiar silhouette, a shadow against a shadow and a dim memory of warmth. Then three bad people haul him away.

  I

  THE STAIN.

  There is a new stain in my cell.

  My cellmate—he just sneered when I asked his name, like I wasn’t worthy of even that front-porch intimacy—has contributed more than a few stains during his tenancy. I’ve watched him piss through the bars at guards in the hall. I’ve watched him vomit onto the floor after drinking some rotten concoction of fruit and cleaning products. I’ve tried to avoid watching him when he hunches in his bunk, grunting and thrusting to the thought of whatever blimp-breasted aberration might tickle his brain stem.

  He hasn’t always used his own fluids, though. Sometimes he’s used mine. He has spattered my blood with fists and feet, and occasionally, when he’s caught me on a bad day, when my head is full of fading memories and the creeping realization that I will not get to experience the life we’re all afforded, that I will miss all the milestones and die a half-formed thing—on those days, he has smeared my tears into the concrete, mixing them with my blood.

  My cellmate has painted many stains, but today’s is his masterpiece. This one obliterates his earlier efforts. It covers them completely as it spreads across the floor.

  Prison security becomes looser when the world outside is collapsing. It becomes possible to acquire pencils, for example, for drawing and journaling and other therapeutic expressions.

  The cellblock door bangs open and boots march toward me. The camera in the corner stares down at my cellmate’s prone form. I can think of nothing more absurd than the fact that I’ll be be punished for this, here in this place whose sole purpose is to remove dangerous men from society. Well, I have removed one. Let God punish me for preempting his plan, but here on Earth I should be praised for my pragmatism.

  The boots stop in front of my cell. My grandfather watches the blood pool around my bare feet. He smiles.

  “I think you’re ready.”

  He nods to the two men at his sides—not prison guards; I don’t recognize their militaristic black uniforms—and they leave us. He leans close to the bars.

  “What do you think, R—? Do you think you’re ready?”

  I grab his shirt and pull his face against the bars hard enough to bruise his papery skin. “Three years,” I snarl. “You left me here for three years.”

  He is grimacing and chuckling like he’s wrestling with a toddler. “Easy, kid! Take it easy on the old man.”

  I throw him backward and glower at him while he adjusts his collar.

  “What was it you said last time I was here? That you were learning a lot? Well, you had more to learn. And now I think you’ve learned it.”

  My eyes drift around the prison. Most of the cells are empty now. The law machine is rusty and missing a thousand cogs, and no one has time to repair it. It won’t be long before the meals stop coming.

  “Why did you kill that man, R—?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You went to great lengths to minimize casualties in your fires. ‘Life belongs to God,’ you said. So why did you kill that man?”

  “He’d done terrible things,” I mumble. “He deserved to die.”

  “That’s everyone who ever lived. If you’re God’s executioner, why haven’t you been killing folks your whole life? Why’s this pig fucker your first?”

  The prison blurs in my vision. I focus on the bloody handprints I left on my grandfather’s shirt. “Because he hurt me. Because I hated him.”

  “Because you wanted to kill him.”

  I nod.

  “And that’s what it boils down to, R—. What you want. No one really does anything that doesn’t benefit them. Behind every moral stance is a selfish desire. The harshest asceticism, the saintliest altruism . . . they all satisfy some inner urge. To feel strong, to feel needed, to feel good. No matter what your moral kick, it’s always about you. Because who else is there?”

  He approaches the bars again. The rage has drained out of me. I can’t bring myself to look at his narrow brown eyes so I look down at my feet. The blood oozing between my toes.

  “You’re alone, R—. You’re the only person. All these things walking around you might look like people, but they only exist in relation to you. They are what they do for you and how they make you feel. For all you know, they might disappear whenever you’re not looking at them.”

  The blood is already cold. The man who shared this tiny cube with me for more than three years is fading from existence before my eyes. He’s transparent; I can see the concrete through his inconsequential heap of meaty debris; I am already forgetting what little I knew about him.

  “It takes us a lifetime of confusion and struggle to realize what animals are born knowing,” my grandfather says in his smoky growl. “That there’s nothing to know. That we’re searching for meaning in an empty room. That the purpose of life is to live as long as you can, eat as much as you can, fuck as much as you can, to spread your genes and your ideas and turn as much of the world as you can into you.”

  He grins, showing those crooked brown teeth. “And you know what? It’s fun. Once you know what life’s really about, it’s fucking fun.”

  A shudder runs from my sticky toes through my groin and up into my skull. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to work for me.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Times are changing. Commerce is dying. Everyone’s running for the hills to grow corn and wait for the Rapture, but I won’t stop.” His grin has stiffened into a fierce grimace, lips tight on his teeth. “You hear me, R—Atvist? I’ll never stop. The end of the world is an opportunity. We just have to figure out how to seize it.”

  I look around at this prison where I spent the better part of my youth. I became an adult here. I shed my teenage skin here, stepped out of it muscled and scarred and powerful, and then I remained in this cell, staring at these bars, brooding over the rules of a fictional universe while the real one outside moved on.

  I have never touched a woman. I have never tasted a beer. But I have killed a man and I have razed a city.

  “I’ll help,” I tell my grandfather. “I have ideas.”

  His grin returns. His breath wafts through the gaps in his teeth, tobacco and stale coffee. “Can’t wait to hear them, kid.”

  He pulls a keycard out of his wallet. He swipes it over the cell door, the lock clicks, and I’m free. I step into the hall and follow Mr. Atvist out of the prison, leaving a trail of red footprints on the concrete.

  I HAVE KILLED MANY PEOPLE. I have eaten their flesh and drank their memories, men, women, and children. I will never deny or forget this, but I will accept it. I did monstrous things because I was a monster, driven by unfathomable hungers and barely conscious throughout, lacking name and identity and moral framework. I have mourned this dark chapter, learned what I could from it, and turned the page. I have forgiven my second life.

  But what about my first? There is no fanciful plague to blame for this. My origina
l self is not an absurd ghoul pulled from pulp fiction. He has a name; he has a mother, a father, and a grandfather, and he made his choices in the same mundane way anyone makes them.

  Who is that man? I inhabit his body and possess his memories, but he is alien to me. I feel more kinship with the mindless corpse than this bitter, rudderless, world-blaming wretch. But somehow, through some obscure alchemy of time, those two elements merged . . . and became me.

  I open my eyes.

  Steel bars. The stench of sweat and mildew. Am I still in the dream? I’m lying flat on my stomach, so I pull myself to my knees and attempt to look around, and then the pain hits. My fingers move to touch the epicenter; a huge, puffy bruise rises from my forehead like a tumor.

  “Always the late sleeper,” says a soft voice that definitely doesn’t live in the prison of my past. My vision clears on the face of a beautiful woman. The bruise on her forehead matches mine. A dry chuckle creeps out of me.

  “Your head . . . Did we . . . ?”

  Julie offers a melancholy smile. “Looks like it.”

  “Kissing contusions,” Nora mumbles. “Serves you right for being disgusting.”

  The floor under my hands is stiff commercial carpet, its mottled beige designed to be the sum of all stains, victory by preemptive surrender. The room is bare, and all of David Boeing’s passengers sit on the floor, leaning wearily against the walls, except for my kids and Julie’s mother. I have a moment of panic before I see them in their own room across the hall, visible through barred interior windows. Audrey paces in a circle, snapping her teeth, and Joan and Alex huddle in a corner, hiding from her. The buzzing fluorescent lights turn our faces the same sickly gray as theirs.

  “You’re lucky, though,” Nora continues. “You slept through a fun interrogation session. First of many, I’m sure.”

  I scan her for injuries and have a moment of shock at her missing finger before remembering that happened long ago, in another life that even Julie is left to wonder about. Nora has a few scratches, but these are probably from the rough landing. When Axiom moves from convince to coerce, it doesn’t stop with scratches.